


Change Of Plans

by jungle_ride



Category: A League of Their Own (1992)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-24
Updated: 2018-03-24
Packaged: 2019-04-07 09:14:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14077665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jungle_ride/pseuds/jungle_ride
Summary: There’s only one floodlight on, its bright white light illuminating a single patch of the field as Dottie makes her way across the green towards it. Like a month to the flame she vaguely thinks as her eyes search for the familiar silhouette of Jimmy Dugan. She spots him with relative ease, refilling the pitching machine. Although she still too far away to make out the intimate details of his face she has come to know them by heart, a fact she now no longer holds any guilt about. So Dottie can already tell by the way his shoulders are tensed, that his forehead is no doubt, creased with lines, his eyes squinting in that Dugan way. He’s annoyed and frustrated, with her Dottie suspects. No, she knows the source for this impromptu batting practice, is one hundred percent due to her.





	Change Of Plans

**Author's Note:**

  * For [elegantstupidity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elegantstupidity/gifts).



> First time giving this couple a whirl, I do hope you enjoy what I came up with.

There’s only one floodlight on, its bright white light illuminating a single patch of the field as Dottie makes her way across the green towards it. Like a month to the flame she vaguely thinks as her eyes search for the familiar silhouette of Jimmy Dugan. She spots him with relative ease, refilling the pitching machine. Although she still too far away to make out the intimate details of his face she has come to know them by heart, a fact she now no longer holds any guilt about. So Dottie can already tell by the way his shoulders are tensed, that his forehead is no doubt, creased with lines, his eyes squinting in that Dugan way. He’s annoyed and frustrated, with her Dottie suspects. No, she knows the source for this impromptu batting practice, is one hundred percent due to her.

She’s still surprised though, not at this anger but rather the route he’s chosen to try and tame it. A few months back, Dottie would have expected this annoyance to manifest itself with a bottle of Jack and a string of barbed comments. Expect where before Jimmy had been content to spill his range outwardly, in wild gestures and sharp words, having on many occasions reduced the girls of The Peaches to tears. Bless Evelyn she’d bore the brunt of that far more than the others. Now he was different. Not so he was unrecognisably himself, just different.

Dottie pauses for a moment, watching Jimmy as he finishes refilling the machine and makes his way back to where he has left a baseball bat. He picks it up, swinging it about a few times as he gets a feel of its weight once more. Dottie watches him. It’s a fine sight, for a moment the weight of the years that followed after he could no longer play drift away on the wind and left behind is a much younger Jimmy, the boy dreamer whose first love was the smell of dirt and the dust of a pitch on his clothes.

A second the loud thwack of ball hitting bat echoes out across the empty arena like thunder. It rings in Dottie’s ear like a call from home. She smiles as a second latter another burst of booming sound rips through the night time quiet and washes over her, shaking her bones. Each thud of reverberating sound seems to match the beat of her heart, which hammers away in her chest like a jack rabbit, each beat a little quicker, a little harder as the balls empty from the machine. When the last ball is once more repelled through the air by Jimmy’s heavy swing the world falls silent once more. Dottie chooses this moment to make her presence known.

“Nice form, for an old man that is.” She teases, voice filled with a noticeable fondness. Jimmy surprised by the sudden presence of another, jerks a little, his head spinning around as he glances into the darkness trying to see the intruder. Though judging by the way his lips start to smirk upwards, his early anger disappearing, he already knows exactly who it is.

“I’ll have you known, with age comes dignity Dottie.”

“Dignity? Are you sure that’s what you’ve got Jimmy Dugan?” Dottie raises a questioning eyebrow at him.

“Well I guess you have me stumped with that one. I confess I’ve never had much of the stuff.” Jimmy laughs the sound honest as he removes his hat and rubs at his hair.

“I reckon you’ve got just enough as a man like yourself can handle.” Dottie’s own laugh rings out, soft and gentle.

“What are you doing here?” Jimmy asks a moment later after the laughter dies down naturally.

“Well I figured you hadn’t eaten, so I brought you something.” Dottie lifts up the basket she’d been carrying. “It’s just a few sandwiches and scraps of bits and bobs, but I brought a blanket and some drink, so I figured we could make a picnic of it.”

Jimmy glances at the basket and back up to her face a couple of times, confusion etched across his features. Dottie on her part tries to keep her composure. It’s never been a problem for her before. Dottie has always been good with staying calm under pressure, only now she feels she may be reduced to a puddle on the floor if Jimmy doesn’t stop staring at her like that. His eyes boring into her body as if he can see right to her very soul.

“You afraid I’ll give you food poisoning or you just not hungry?” she quips, speaking only to break the uncomfortable silence that seems to be suffocating them. Jimmy says nothing and scans her face, searching for the answer to a question he has not spoken.

“I thought you and Bob, would be long gone by now.” Jimmy comments, just when Dottie thinks she might scream from the anticipation of it all.

“Change of plans.” She shrugs offering a tentative half smile.

“Care to enlighten me as to what those plans are?” Jimmy asks, removing his hat once more to scratch at his head. Something Dottie knew to be something he did out of habit when he was perplexed as to what to do. Or in this case when his hopes were growing high but he didn’t want to allow himself to feel it, just in case disappointment was to follow.

Dottie’s who has been waiting for this moment since the second she’d finally allowed herself to admit the truth was struck by an inexplicable chill of fear. What if all those moments she’d thought her and Jimmy had shared were in fact an illusion. Could she have misread them all? She takes a deep breath in an attempt to compose herself and decides she better just grit her teeth and spit it out, baring whatever the consequences of it might be.

“Well for a start I guess they’ll have to change by name on the program, to Miss Dottie Keller.” She says it with as much nonchalance as she can muster but the weight and finality of the words cannot be hidden, like the sound of baseball being struck by a bat.

“You and Bob?” Jimmy eyes widen, it was clear that whatever he had thought she was going to say, that had certainly not been it. There’s a shimmer in those eyes now, a wide eyed hopefulness that has Dottie’s heart fluttering in her chest. It puts any fear she’d held from a moment ago to rest.

“Bob and I got to talking and we figured out that home just isn’t the same place for us anymore.”

Jimmy nods along to her words, mind obviously working to fully process the meaning and intent of them. Dottie can practically fill the tectonic plates between them shifting, bringing them closer together even if the physically distance between them hadn’t changed.

“He took that well?” Jimmy questions, eyebrows rising doubtfully. For all his blustering Jimmy had a lot more kindness to him than he allowed to show, which only furthered how right this moment felt to Dottie.

“Bob’s a good man and there’s still a lot of love between us, always will be but it’s a different kind now. I’m not in love with him. I’ve fallen for someone else.”

“Fell for the game huh?” Jimmy says, a cocky half smile ghosting his lips.

“Hmmm something like that.” Dottie hums pressing her lips together to conceal her own bright smile.

“It’s strange isn’t it,” Jimmy says taking a tentative step closer to her, after a second’s hesitation.

“What is?” Dottie mirrors his movement, closing the distance between them further.

“How you can start out as one person and change into another.” Reaching out a hand he curls it softly around her waist and pulls her closer to him. He gives her a moment, offering her the chance to pull away, to change her mind. Only Dottie has already made her decision and she has no intention of changing it. So instead she reaches up her arms and encircles them around his neck knocking off his hat as she does do in order to run her hands through his hair. She has been wanting to do that for so long.

“Stranger still how one person can change you so much.” Jimmy continues, his smile growing wider as the moment ticks on. “How that one person can become so much to you.”

Dottie nods, fingertips stroking gently at the nape of his neck as slowly, they lean towards each other, their lips meeting in a gentle press of reassurance and new beginnings.


End file.
